Billowing clouds of ash swallow the ancient Roman city, and fireballs rain down. Whole city
blocks slide into the sea, and a tsunami tears through the streets, leveling everything in its
path.

When Mount Vesuvius erupts in A.D. 79 — feel free to direct spoiler complaints to Pliny the
Younger — the movie is absorbing.

But you must first endure more than an hour of derivative plot and tired dialogue.

The similarities between
Gladiator and
Pompeii are hard to overstate.

In both cases, a warrior is enslaved after his family is murdered. In both cases, he turns out
to have an exceptional talent for killing people, he befriends an African gladiator and he falls in
love with a woman leagues above his social standing.

But only in
Pompeii does the protagonist talk to horses. Milo (Kit Harington from
Game of Thrones) is the last member of a Celtic tribe of equestrians that is massacred by
Roman soldiers led by Corvus (Kiefer Sutherland) and his right-hand man, Proculus (Sasha Roiz).
Milo manages to escape his parents’ fate at age 6, but he is scooped up, enslaved and, years later,
becomes a killing machine who can enter an arena unarmed and take out three sword-wielding
opponents. Milo could be a star if he weren’t stuck in provincial Londinium.

And so he is sent to Pompeii. Along the way, he meets Cassia (Emily Browning), the daughter of a
powerful politician, and notices that the two people whom he would most like to kill — Corvus and
Proculus — also happen to be in town. To make matters worse, Corvus has his eye on Cassia. Most of
the movie is taken up by scene after scene of gladiatorial games, but, when Milo isn’t fighting, he
is sharing passionate looks with Cassia and steely glares with Corvus.

None of that really matters once the ground begins to shake and Vesuvius wakes from its slumber.
Then the film moves from a
Gladiator clone to a less successful Roland Emmerich catastrophe picture. Say what you
will about the man behind
White House Down and
Independence Day, but the character developments in those movies seem pretty good compared
with the scant dialogue and simplistic personalities in Milo’s world.

Still,
Pompeii does Emmerich one better in the special-effects department. Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil,
The Three Musketeers) creates harrowing simulations of the disaster. The result is enough
to make you want him to ditch the sword-and-sandals background story altogether.

Harington’s star is on the rise. But his first starring movie role doesn’t showcase what he can
do as an actor.

He transformed his body for the role, but here’s the real disaster: His startlingly defined abs
are the most memorable part of his character.